The Moving Floor
Most engineers think careers are ladders.
You start at the bottom, improve your skills, work harder than everyone else, and slowly climb upward through merit. The assumption underneath most career advice is: become exceptional enough, and the system will eventually recognize you.
But in technology, careers are often shaped less by individual talent than by the speed of the system around you.
A growing company is not a ladder.
It is an escalator.
A few years ago, I watched an engineer become a Director of Engineering at a company worth over $10 billion before turning 27.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by one of the fastest-growing GenAI video companies Higgsfield AI.
While coding agents transformed software engineering, Higgsfield is doing the same for filmmaking, marketing, and content production with Supercomputer — a long-running creative agent capable of generating entire campaigns, films, and viral media systems autonomously.
The scale already looks unreal:
$300M annualized revenue run rate
24M users across 240+ countries
750M+ videos and images generated
6M generations per day
5B+ social reach through (Instagram: higgsfield.ai)
Fortune 500 customers
$5M+ paid directly to creators
Higgsfield’s proprietary harness combines persistent memory, multi-agent orchestration, parallel execution, co-located GPU infrastructure, and frontier video models including Veo, Kling, GPT Image 2, Seedance 2.0, and their own Soul Cinematic stack.
The proof is already here: an 80-minute AI-generated feature film premiering at Cannes.
They’re hiring engineers, researchers, designers, and operators to build the frontier of creative AI:
Thanks to Higgsfield AI for sponsoring, let’s get back to this week’s thought!
Well,
A few years ago, I watched an engineer become a Director of Engineering at a company worth over $10 billion before turning 27.
They were good, smart, reliable, technically sharp. But not extraordinary in the way the industry romanticizes. They were not publishing breakthrough papers or reinventing distributed systems. Nobody would have described them as the best engineer in the building.
They joined at the right moment.
When they arrived, the company was small enough that everyone still fit into a single all-hands meeting. Four years later, the company had thousands of employees, multiple offices, and management layers that did not exist when they joined.
The company needed leaders faster than the market could produce them.
So it promoted the people who were already there.
At the same time, I knew engineers at large prestigious companies who were to be honest far more capable. People with frightening technical depth. Engineers who could debug impossible failures, reason across enormous distributed systems, and make hard problems look routine.
Many of them barely moved. I mean, of course, they became Senior/Staff engineers or Engineering Managers but …
This sounds unfair until you understand the mechanism.
In slow-growing companies, promotions become scarce resources. For one person to rise, another often has to move aside. Managers defend headcount because headcount becomes status, influence, and survival.
The organization stops expanding outward.
So ambition turns inward.
That is why Big Tech companies become political even when the people inside them are reasonable. Scarcity changes behavior. When organizations stop creating opportunity organically, employees begin competing over the existing supply instead.
Over time, the company starts rewarding people who are most legible to the system rather than most useful to it. Engineers optimize for visibility instead of velocity. Meetings become more important. Narrative becomes more important. Over-alignment becomes more important. Keeping every cross team in the loop becomes more important.
No no no … People there are not vicious by design or irrational.
Just growth changes the geometry entirely.
When a company doubles every year, bureaucracy cannot stabilize fast enough to defend itself. Entire teams must be created before experienced managers exist to run them. Leadership gaps appear everywhere simultaneously. The organization becomes structurally incapable of preserving old hierarchies because reality is changing faster than hierarchy can adapt.
This creates one of the strangest dynamics in technology:
Fast-growing companies often accelerate careers faster than competence itself develops.
Engineers dislike admitting this because engineering culture is deeply attached to meritocracy. We want outcomes to feel proportional to skill. Write better code, think more clearly, make better decisions, and eventually the market should reward you fairly.
Sometimes it does.
But markets reward leverage more consistently than virtue.
And growth is leverage.
The difference is that high-growth environments continuously manufacture new surface area for ambition.
Big corp environments manufacture competition over existing surface area.
Most people in technology underestimate how much this single variable shapes careers. They optimize for prestige, compensation, or technical purity while ignoring whether the system around them is expanding fast enough to create opportunity faster than bureaucracy can contain it.
This does not mean growth is everything. Hypergrowth also creates inflated titles, fragile leaders, and people who mistake organizational momentum for personal greatness. Some only discover this after the escalator stops moving.
But even this reinforces the same principle.
Systems shape outcomes more powerfully than individuals want to admit.
The most important question in your career may not be:
“Am I working hard enough?”
It may be:
“Is the floor beneath me moving?”
If you found this helpful, please like or share it with a friend and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
Thanks for reading,
Adlet Balzhanov
Connect with me on LinkedIn, just use the button below. I read every message. Cheers!